WE PLANTED A FEW SEEDS
Sally Alexander co-organised the first Women’s Liberation Conference at Oxford’s Ruskin College in 1970. “Women had been meeting in small groups since the late 1960s, inspired by civil rights, the utopian elements of May ’68 events in France and the Ford sewing machine workers in Dagenham.
“An ad hoc collection of women came together to organise what was originally thought of as a History of Women conference in Oxford, including myself and Arielle Aberson, both of us students at Ruskin. Women from Scandinavia, Germany, France, US and Canada were among the 500 or so who came. Papers were presented on every aspect of women’s lives, from housework to childcare, mental health, history of militancy, poetry.
“By the end of the weekend, we had the first four demands: equal pay and education, free birth control and abortion, and 24-hour nurseries. The movement just exploded into life, campaigns leading to the landmark legislation of the Equal Pay and Equal
“We changed younger women’s expectations”
Opportunities Act; reform of marriage, recognition of rape in marriage, provision for women’s refuges and so on. Also women’s publishing houses, law centres, nurseries and creches, women’s history and more.
“By the 1980s it segued into several movements: Black feminism, Greenham and peace and spiritual movements, women’s writing, history, anthropology and more flourished and fertilised, changing the expectations of younger women, some of them our daughters and now granddaughters.
“The younger generations don’t want to be like us, or even know much about us – but we planted a few seeds, as the suffragists did before us.”